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New submitter brondsem writes:
"Today the Apache Software Foundation announced the Allura project for hosting software development projects. Think GitHub or SourceForge on your own servers — Allura has git, svn, hg, wiki, tickets, forums, news, etc. It's written in python and has a modular and extensible platform so you can write your own tools and extensions. It's already used by SourceForge, DARPA, German Aerospace Center, and Open Source Projects Europe. Allura is open source; available under the Apache License v2.0. When you don't want all your project resources in the cloud on somebody else's walled garden, you can run Allura on your own servers and have full control and full data access."
(SourceForge shares a corporate overlord with Slashdot).

SourceForge started bundling crapware with downloads under the last overlords. They're flailing around trying to find a business model. GitHub has one (design a decent service, give it away free to hippies, sell it to people with money), SourceForge never did, and can't have the same one (would you pay for SourceForge?).

Those links are posted by the Praetorians and hide a secret portal leading to a mysterious backdoor. Thanks to CyberBob, I know how it works: hold the left shift key on your keyboard then click directly in the middle of the top loop of the "8". If you do it correctly, you will get to the backdoor and it will be wide open.

You're not thinking big enough because if you were, you'd realize that in the bigger scheme of things, applications like this will allow people to have their own GitHubs / SourceForges. Just imagine that...At first, it might be counter-intuitive, but in the long run, it will only add to it at exponential levels.

This makes no sense. If you want to search for code, the obvious way to do it today is use Google or some other search engine. Tomorrow, the obvious way to do it... will be to use Google or some other search engine. You don't need a "federated search", you just need a good search engine. There are a number of code-specific search engines that already work today too, again, there's no need for one system to rule them all.

I think there's great advantage in having an OSS management system for managing O

People who want to store their own projects on their own servers instead of having Crapware bundled with their downloads on SourceForge or who don't like the tedious process of publishing on Github can use this thing and SEO or twitter their way to the mainstream search engines - or maybe they just want to use it internally and don't care about people knowing about their stuff.

As for a federated register, if we look at the existing models (Wikipedia, Apple App Store, Google Play Store) then THAT is the end of OSS. When a small clique decides what is acceptable and what is not then the outcome looks good but that's just because the people or projects that are crushed are lost in the background noise.

You mean you want a centralized registry? You mean like Freshmeat (aka Freecode)?

Nobody uses SourceForge for new projects anymore because it became too commercialized and the interfaces became cluttered and a pain to use. I have no doubt that the same thing will happen to GitHub, eventually.

If you want OSS to thrive, you want people eat their own dog food. They need to run their own servers, host their own projects, and in general stop being pansies too afraid to run a web server. A VPS is like $15/month th

Nobody uses SourceForge for new projects anymore because it became too commercialized and the interfaces became cluttered and a pain to use. I have no doubt that the same thing will happen to GitHub, eventually.

I'm not sure it will. SourceForge had a confusing business model that included selling ads and bundling crapware. GitHub's model is quite simple: they sell project hosting. The open-source-hosting GitHub site is just an advert. Their business model relies on people using their free product, becoming familiar with it, and advocating it within their organisations. If they start doing the same sorts of things to their UI that SourceForge did then their revenue stream dries up.

I doubt anyone will appear as a github/sourceforge competitor using this. What they will use it for, and should be encouraged, is to host their own projects internally as a competitor to crap like sharepoint. Local dev teams in companies that need to manage their own software need this kind of thing (or one of the many competitor projects)

When Sourceforge and similar sites first came online they were offering a service that was hard to duplicate locally for most open source development teams.

Today the equivalent would be offering virtual machine instances running complex application frameworks, probably deployed with a set of puppet modules maintained by the development team and also offered for download. That's the "missing infrastructure" in 2014.ï